Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched

by Kim Barnouin

  “Clementine,” she enunciated as I came over, “I hope I didn’t cause too much of a fuss. But a pasta really should be toothsome.”

  Okay, first of all, who said toothsome with a straight face? And second, well, shit. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

  “Of course I wouldn’t have breathed a word if you’d made it yourself,” Dominique said, barely looking at me. “But I thought you’d want your chef to know,” she added in an exaggerated whisper.

  “Actually, I’m owner and executive chef and I did make your dish myself,” I said, my knuckles practically white from gripping the back of Zach’s chair.

  Zach turned and shot me a look that said, Did you have to go there?

  Yeah, I did. I could pretty much be counted on to say what needed to be said. Wasn’t that why he’d fallen in love with me?

  A faux smile spread across Dominique’s matte-red lips. “Well, dear, even the best chefs have something to learn. You’re all of what—twenty-five, Clementine? Though I must say, having your own restaurant, even a cute little place like this”—she glanced around—“is quite an accomplishment.”

  Even. Ha. She was everything Zach said she’d be and more. She’d looked at him pointedly as she’d said that last bit, which meant she thought Zach had funded Clementine’s No Crap Café. For the record: I hadn’t taken one penny from Zach. Not that he hadn’t tried to foist his money on me. But I opened this “cute little place” with my own blood, sweat, and hard-earned cash.

  And by the way, I was twenty-six.

  “Well, my Jamaican jerk tofu is fabulous,” said Zach. “And that’s coming from a serious carnivore.”

  “Agreed,” Avery said, taking another bite of her own jerk tofu. “And I know vegan food. This is the best I’ve had.”

  Gareth took a swig of his beer. “I have to admit—my burger is pretty damned good for sprout food.”

  I smiled at them. The Jeffries siblings were keepers, definitely.

  Considering that Zach had told me that Dominique preferred caviar to just about anything else, I’d take Mommy Dearest’s opinion on my precision-timed, homemade, organic pasta with a few grains of sea salt. Even if it still stung.

  Keira, Dominique’s twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter, wrinkled her nose at her lasagna, one of tonight’s other specials. “Clementine, I wasn’t going to say anything, but since we’re on the subject . . . Um, I’m really sorry, but I’m not loving this Parmesan cheese.” She leaned in and whispered, “It tastes a little . . . funny.”

  “It’s vegan Parmesan,” Avery told her. “It’s not supposed to taste like the stuff you sprinkle on pasta.”

  “Oh,” Keira said, poking at her lasagna. Keira was the only child of Dominique’s second and current husband. Dominique and Zach’s father had divorced when Zach was a teenager. Dominique had been married to her second husband, even wealthier than her first, for sixteen years, and according to Zach, she considered Keira her own flesh and blood. “I keep forgetting what’s vegan and what’s not.”

  Avery saved me from schooling her. “Keira, vegans don’t eat anything that comes from an animal, and that includes dairy, which includes milk, which is turned into butter or cheese.”

  I needed to get back into the kitchen before I said something that would get me in trouble. “Well, let me get started on another plate of the fettuccine,” I told Dominique.

  “Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” she said. “I had two bites, and that’s really all I allow myself of overly rich food. But on the next order, remember that a toothsome pasta is neither too soft nor too firm. And, sweetie,” she whispered, “the salmon walls are a bit too orange. A more subtle shade would work better. And the silverware could be a hair heavier. Just a hair.” She smiled at me.

  I had spent hours torturing the paint mixer at Home Depot to create that exact shade of shimmery persimmon. “Perhaps it’s a generational thing,” I blurted out.

  She fixed a death stare on me. “Yes,” she drawled out. “It’s like I always say. Youth is absolutely wasted on the young.”

  Zach was staring at me with an expression that implored, Not. Another. Word.

  I forced myself to smile and headed back into the kitchen. The moment I stepped inside the noisy, bustling space, I felt instantly more at peace.

  “I will keep my mouth shut. I will keep my mouth shut,” I said to my sous chef, Alanna. “I will slowly count to five.”

  “I won’t even ask,” Alanna said, sliding mushrooms into a pinging hot pan.

  I counted to five. I breathed. I focused on the next orders, pouring olive oil in a pan to help my vegetable chef keep up with the demand for the roasted vegetable skewers.

  “Clem? You okay?” came Zach’s voice from behind me.

  I closed my eyes for a second. No way would I admit—even to myself—that his mother had gotten to me. I turned around and smiled. “I’m fine. No worries. Go finish your dinner.” I gave his hand a squeeze.

  “Clem. You’re forgetting that I know you.”

  “The pasta was perfect,” I whispered, hating how stung I really felt. “I made sure of it.”

  “I’m sure it was. She’s just . . . difficult. Look, you’re my brand-new fiancée. She’s my mother. Just ignore her when she gets to you. Don’t even bother engaging. Okay?”

  For a second, as I looked at Zach, this guy whom I loved so much, I felt all the anger whoosh out of me. But a moment later, it was back.

  I motioned for one of the McMann twins to take over my pan. “Zach, if she insults me, I can’t just not say anything.”

  “You can try. For me. ‘Letting it go’ is how she and I manage to have a relationship. If I want her in my life—and I do—I need to accept her. When she crosses a line, believe me, I tell her.”

  His expression changed for a second, and I realized he was talking about the incident that had blown up their relationship a few years ago. She had crossed a line—I had no idea over what. And he’d told her. The result? They hadn’t spoken for three years.

  “I have to pick my battles, Clem. That means letting go of what’s really just nonsense.”

  Letting it go wasn’t in my vocabulary, though. Since Zach and I had been together, I’d listened to his stories about his mother, how difficult she was, how long it had taken him to accept that she was who she was. That meant not jumping on every misstep she made. But my motto was more along the lines of Start as you mean to go on.

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But just like you don’t expect her to change who she is, don’t expect me to change who I am.”

  “I don’t want you to change,” he said, pulling me close. “I love you just as you are, Clementine Cooper.”

  “I love you too,” I whispered.

  “You basically told her she was old,” Zach said with a rueful smile.

  “I used the word generational,” I reminded him. “Completely different.”

  He rolled his eyes at me, but kissed me on the cheek and headed out of the kitchen into the dining room.

  I walked over to my station and took over my pans from Evan.

  “Ah, fighting over food and relatives. It’s like they’re already family,” Gunnar said with a firm chop of his knife into an artichoke heart.

  8

  At just after midnight, Zach and I sat on his couch, Charlie curled up beside me with his warm, little head resting on my leg. I’d taken a long, hot shower so that I no longer smelled like garlic and pancetta and cinnamon churros.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a huge, antique-looking book on the coffee table.

  He pulled it over to his lap. “It’s an old photo album from when I was a kid. I rarely dig it out, but the conversation at dinner got me nostalgic, I guess.”

  “What was the conversation at dinner? Besides how much your mother hated my restaurant.”

  “She didn’t hate it. In fact, she was quite impressed by it, by you. I could tell.”

  “Ha.”

  “I’m serious. I know he
r, Clementine. In fact, at dinner, she said you reminded her of Aunt Jocelyn. Even though Jocelyn is my father’s aunt, my mother was very close with her when she and my dad were married.”

  “I remind her of an eighty-six-year-old woman?”

  Zach smiled. “In her day, Jocelyn was a live wire. The first to try something new, anything daring. Tell her no, and she’d find a way to accomplish it. Her least favorite word has always been appropriate.”

  “I knew I liked Aunt Jocelyn. Are she and your mother still close?”

  “They had some big falling out during my parents’ divorce and they never recovered.”

  He opened up the photo album. I usually wasn’t into looking at people’s old photos of their family, relatives posing in front of cars on dull cross-country trips, endless shots of sunburned kids at beaches, but this family was going to be my family.

  “Were you and your mother ever close?” I asked, looking at the next photograph, of his mother on a boardwalk in her swimsuit, absolutely stunning, even with her early-eighties, huge hair.

  “Not really. I was much closer to my father.”

  “What was the big fight about?”

  He leaned back on the couch and rubbed Charlie’s belly. “She came between my sister and her boyfriend—someone Avery really loved. The guy was a starving artist, hipster, and hippie rolled into one, and Avery was about to move with him to New York City and fund his life. My mother did everything she could to break them up.”

  What? Awful! “Like what?”

  “Planting seeds of doubt, making up stories about a friend who had fallen into the same ‘trap’ of supporting a failed artist—that kind of thing. Manipulation at its worst. Avery became a wreck and all her sudden doubting started huge arguments with her boyfriend. In the end, my mother got her wish, and Avery was left with a broken heart. Three years later, she’s never found anyone she loved like she loved that guy. My mother still thinks it’s for the best.”

  Dominique was some piece o’ work. “Did Avery pull away from your mother?” From what I could tell during the family dinner at my restaurant, Avery and her mother were chummy. No bad blood there. And Avery seemed very much her own person.

  Zach shook his head. “She actually ended up running to her for comfort, and my mother was there with open arms, of course. Dominique got exactly what she wanted. The whole thing infuriated me. My mom and I had a huge argument about it, both said a bunch of stuff we regret, though half of what I said I did mean. We didn’t speak for years.”

  Not that family discord and estrangements were a good thing, but I was glad to hear Zach had stood up for his sister, stood up for what was right. “What got you talking again?” I asked, looking at another photo, of Zach as a young boy, so adorable, holding his mother’s hand, his twin sister, Avery, on the other side.

  “Aunt Jocelyn. She asked me to make peace with her, said life was too short for grudges, just make peace and let live, et cetera. I realized how much it bothered me that my mother and I were on the outs, and for so long, and I decided my aunt was right. We made peace, never discussed the fight, and now we’re just having a nice, superficial relationship.”

  “Same for your brother and sister?”

  “My sister’s a bit closer to her, but, yeah, same thing.”

  I thought about Jocelyn, that beautiful, elegant elderly woman, more full of life and energy than some slugs sitting around looking bored at Jolie’s wedding while Jocelyn twirled around the dance floor. “So did Aunt Jocelyn take her own advice? Did she make peace with your mother too?”

  “She said she tried, but my mother wouldn’t budge.”

  He turned the page and laughed at a photo of his brother, Gareth, no older than five, crying in a mud puddle at a zoo.

  I tried to imagine not talking to my mother. I could talk to my mother about anything. I didn’t often, but I could. Back when Zach and I were trying to figure out how to have a relationship without killing each other, I’d confided in my mother, and her words of wisdom—that I’d find my way with him, that I’d figure it out—went a long way.

  He closed the photo album and slid it back on the coffee table, then pulled me close against him. “So you see why I asked you to just let stuff go? Not important stuff, Clem. The small stuff—little zinged comments should roll off, not offend you.”

  I wasn’t so sure I agreed with that. Why did she get to shoot her zingers? Just because she was capable of much worse? “But then doesn’t what needs to be said just go unsaid forever? Are the choices really just no relationship or a very superficial one?”

  “Dominique and I are both trying. Taking baby steps. She’s who she is—but who she is, is my mother. She’s the only one I have.”

  I took his hand and held it. “Okay. I’ll hold my tongue. For you.”

  I could do that. After all, it wasn’t as though Dominique would be a huge part of our lives.

  My cell phone, on Zach’s bedside table, woke me up. I glanced at the time. Just past 9:00 a.m. Zach and I had stayed up talking until two, and how he’d gotten up at seven and headed to his health club for an hour before work was beyond me.

  “My mom just called,” he said. “She feels terrible for getting off on the wrong foot and wants to make amends by planning the wedding. We don’t have to do anything but show up and then take off for Bali for two weeks.”

  What?

  I bolted up in bed, hoping this was a dream. A nightmare. But I was definitely wide-awake.

  “Zach, considering that your mother and I don’t see eye to eye, I’m not sure handing over the wedding is a good idea.”

  I couldn’t even begin to imagine what a woman who’d dissed the color of the walls of my restaurant—at our first meeting—would try to get me to agree to. And hadn’t Zach just shared the extent of her manipulative powers? Not that they’d work on me. But still.

  “Clem, didn’t you say you wanted to be engaged for years or elope because you were way too busy to plan a wedding? I wouldn’t sic my mother on you if I didn’t think she was in her element. She has incredible taste. The worst it’ll be is too expensive.”

  “Zach, I—”

  “It’s an easy way for her to be a big part of the most important event of my life. And a way for you two to get to know each other. It would mean a lot to me, Clem.”

  Oh, hell.

  I wanted to shout, No fucking way. Instead I said, “You owe me.”

  The minute Zach and I hung up, I called Sara.

  “Help. Zach’s mother insists on planning the wedding. Zach and I just spent hours last night talking about how much it means to him that his mother is back in his life. It’s so important to him that we get along, that she’s a part of this. But she’s a maniac!”

  “Can’t you tell her you’ve already hired a wedding planner?”

  “She’d tell me to fire whoever it was.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Sara said. “Subterfuge is my gift.”

  The restaurant was closed on Mondays, but despite that Good Morning, L.A. was bumping my ratatouille segment until next month, I still had a packed day, starting with an interview with a local magazine, lunch with my sister, who thought the whole thing with Dominique was hilarious and some sort of karmic payback—for what, I had no clue—a trip to the farmers’ market for fresh produce for the next few days, and a coffee date with Alanna to plan the specials for the week. I had no time to think up excuses or white lies or even think about my wedding for a minute.

  Every time my cell phone rang, I looked in dread at the caller ID, expecting it to be Dominique. But she hadn’t called once. Maybe she was off and running without even asking me what I thought. Or maybe she wouldn’t be so in my face about her ideas. Maybe I’d been worrying for nothing.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” Sara said into my iPhone on Tuesday morning as I headed up Montana Avenue to the restaurant. “It’s so brilliantly simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it yesterday. Just decide what kind of wedding you want, tel
l Dominique, and she’ll plan that, your dream wedding. Done.”

  “The weight of the silverware at the restaurant wasn’t good enough for her. What I’d want and what she’ll want are two very different things.”

  “Just arm yourself. Know what you want and stand firm. You should have no problem with that, Clem.”

  Sara was right.

  Except my relationship with Zach had taught me a word I was never familiar with before: compromise. I was used to it now. And I liked it. I felt that I was growing up. Not everything would go my way. Caring about him meant seeing things through his eyes too. I was marrying a man who owned a steak house, for fuck’s sake. I was the Queen of Compromise. I’d tell Dominique I wanted vegan food only at the wedding, she’d demand a mix, and I’d compromise. Fine.

  As I was about to pass Weddings by Francisco, a bridal boutique I’d never noticed before even though it was next door to Tea Emporium, where I got my morning chai to sip on the way to the restaurant, I stopped in front of the window. My eyes! A rhinestone-studded hanger was suspended by wire from the ceiling, and flowing down was a hideously poufy, white gown with overlays and tiers and puff sleeves and a pale pink bow between the boobs. Gah. Who wore this stuff?

  At least I knew what kind of dress I didn’t want.

  Just decide what kind of wedding you want and she’ll plan that, your dream wedding. . . .

  So what kind of wedding did I want? Eloping to Vegas or Paris was out since it would break my dad’s heart.

  I thought about the bunch of weddings I’d been to in the past few months. There was my culinary school friend’s Disneyland hell, with Mickey and Minnie hanging out at the reception. And the get-married-where-you-met idea, à la my sister’s wedding in a bookstore—definitely not big enough for three-hundred-plus guests. Besides the place where Zach and I actually met—the space where he’d almost opened his steak house, across the street from my apartment—was now an expensive hair salon. Forget lotus position in the woods; Zach couldn’t even get into lotus position. Jolie’s wedding was beautiful, but I’d been to so many beach weddings in the past year that it was getting old.